Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Given an apparent prevalence of audio-visual information in everyday lives, understanding how humans perceive thisinformation has gained considerable attention in cognitive science. Previous research has demonstrated that lower (vs.higher) auditory pitch and visual darkness (vs. brightness) are conceptually associated. However, little is known whetherpitch level can affect brightness judgment of a concurrent visual object. To examine this, we presented 27 participants witha random sequence composed of both higher- and lower-pitched versions of 40 musical excerpts, during each of which agrey square appeared on a white background screen. At the end of every excerpt, participants judged the brightness of eachsquare on a 7-point scale (I think this square is ; 1= dark, 7= bright). Although participants were told beforehand thatthe square brightness could be varied across questions, an identical square appeared constantly. A wilcoxon signed-ranktest showed that the same grey square was judged darker (vs. brighter) when it was presented with lower-pitched (vs.higher-pitched) music (Z=-2.931, p¡0.005).